I have nothing against sharks.

They have been swimming the oceans for 400 million years. They predate the dinosaurs. When we are long gone they will still probably be patrolling the deep.

I have a certain empathy with them. I can see the joke. Every time a shark attacks a person it's an outrage, a horror, but no-one bats an eyelid when I open a can of tuna.

They may be incredibly efficient

animals, at the top of the evolutionary tree, but they lack a crucial factor - good PR.

Bees kill more people every year than sharks. In 1996 in America, 1,500 people were seriously injured by toilet cleaning products, compared to 12 by sharks.

In the last decade, only 69 people have been killed by sharks across the world.

More people than that will be killed in a week on this country's roads, yet sharks get the bad press.

There is something fundamentally wrong in this equation somewhere, but then again, you can't ride a hammer-head shark to work, or pop to Safeways on a Great White.

I don't even particularly like fishing. I enjoy the surroundings, the company, the beer. I'm the most fortunate of

fishermen in that I don't mind not

catching anything.

Which was fortunate in the circumstances.....

Between 1950 and 1954, fishermen from Looe, in Cornwall, HQ of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain, caught more than 20,000 sharks - Blues, Portbeagles, Makos, Threshers.

A few weeks before we motored out of harbour, an international shark fishing competition was held in the same waters. Not a single shark was caught, a fact they weren't shouting about in the booking office....

There have always been superstitions about the sea.

Don't go on a ship with a white cat and a widowed woman onboard, or on a boat with big holes in it. That sort of thing. Add to the list when a captain declares "there's a bit of a swell."

History is littered with examples of ships setting sail to the words "it's a tad choppy" and never being seen again.

"Aye it's a bit rough out there" smiled the captain, with the sort of grin

normally reserved for dentists as they mutter "this might hurt a bit."

Two of our party immediately admitted to feeling queasy. Unfortunately, we were still tied to the dock.

And then, a delightful distraction appeared on starboard (or port, minor technical details aside), as a large seal with a horrendous facial scar and a milky white eye approached the boat. Apparently, some years before, a fisherman had slashed through the seal's eye with a knife because it had the temerity to eat fish.

Thankfully, some of his fishing brethren had souls and the seal is now an almost permanent fixture in the harbour, fed by every passing boat.

Comforted by the thought that if there is a heaven, then there's a hell with a blinded fisherman in it, we set out.

It takes time to motor 20 miles. A voyage on a fast boat is like a roller-coaster ride, except at the funfair you are strapped in and no-one throws buckets of water at you. As we sat outside admiring the disappearing coastline, the captain was completely motionless in the cabin. After an hour my friend Jeremy asked "is he still alive?.

"We'll soon hit Cherbourg if he isn't," replied his brother Mike. And so we sailed on.

To pass the time we tried to make sense of the dazzling array of electronic equipment in the cabin.

"I think you'll find that's the fishfinder", confidentially declared Jeremy, pointing at the boat's radio cassette deck.

And then, approaching fast on the horizon, came the Royal Navy. Or the bits of it they could afford to put petrol in. Brittania rules the waves? Only as long as petrol prices permit.

"B*******" screamed the captain, emphatically proving he was still alive.

"We'll have to move. They have the whole sea to play in, but we have to move. Sometimes they sail straight through our nets and it can put a man out of business.

"Watch out for submarines," he continued, "We often see their periscopes. I won't tell you what we do when we do, apart from being thankful they didn't come through the bottom of the boat and sink us."

Great, I was worried about the

weather and sharks, now we were taking on Trident submarines.

And reluctantly, we turned away from the navy, quelling my visions of

hoisting the Jolly Roger and sailing in for the attack, valiantly flinging

mackerel at the destroyers.

Shark fishing is a relatively simple affair.

Get strong line, big hooks, a float, a dead mackerel, tie it together and throw it overboard.

Then wait. For hours.

To attract the 'beast', hang a bag of decaying fish over the side and let a slick of fish oil and blood spread from the boat like a stain. And while you wait for the shark's nose to twitch and its mouth to salivate and the float to disappear in a scream of line....

Mackerel fishing is simple. Get a hook, feather, line and waggle it in the water. Apparently, if you hit a shoal the fish almost jump into the boat.

We never did. In common with most species their numbers are in decline.

When boats first discovered Newfoundland, the Cod were so plentiful in the water, they slowed the boats down.

Pictures in Megavissey Museum showed Cornish Pilchard boats almost sinking due to the weight of the catch. The small caption revealed most of it was thrown out as it couldn't be kept fresh. Now if you buy tinned pilchards in Cornwall, they come from South Africa.

The story is the same for most species, all over the world. Overfishing has wreaked havoc with stocks.

In some places certain nets are banned, species protected and fisherman get paid thousands for destroying their boats and stopping fishing.

Unfortunately, the captain revealed, some then simply build smaller ones to beat the legislation and out they go again.

Still, "it's the quotas that are killing fishing" some skippers still claim with a clarity of thought that is probably dooming the industry.

And we waited. For the shark to take the bait.

Supplied with liberal amounts of tea and coffee, the only gnash of jaws was as Mike consumed his pastie.

The captain held us spellbound with talk of times past, when the fleet was huge, before his sons had to go abroad to find a living in fishing. Before the days fishermen were reduced to taking day-trippers on one hour boat trips. When the sharks were taken in their

thousands.

Thankfully now all sharks caught on these boats are tagged and returned.

But in the long term this isn't going to be enough. Millions are killed annually, far from Cornish shores, the vast

majority to provide shark fin soup.

Once the fin is chopped off, they are dropped back into the sea to drown. As sharks breed infrequently, you do not have to be Einstein to work out the figures do not add up.

Another species could soon be extinct, another lasting

testament to our stupidity.

So we never experienced the thrill of screaming line, seeing the float disappear, a fin break the water, the battle between fisherman and beast. And despite being £35 poorer for the day's adventure, I didn't mind.

Somewhere out there a shark was swimming, as they have been since before Adam and Eve, and I could live without seeing it caught.

And as the boat headed home, the captain turned and said: "Do you know in America, if they catch a shark they don't fight it and the fisherman strain to pull it in. They just winch it in with an electric motor."

And on we went, faces burnt from the wind and the sun, into a future that had apparently learnt little from the past.

l Our trip was run by one of the skippers affiliated to the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain which is based in Looe. Further details of the club are available on its website www.looe.org.

l Various organisations are campaigning to save the shark. The Worldwide Fund for Nature's site on the internet is a good place to start.